Hi all!
I started my self-hosting journey a bit ago and currently host my own instance of Immich. With almost 30k pictures I feel like I want to find the best pictures and print an actual album for each event/trip/etc whenever it makes sense. I was wondering if there are any self-hosted options for this where I can, given a specific album (or folder assuming there is no Immich integration) it will choose the “best” pictures for printing (I understand that “best pictures” is very subjective).
Maybe do some deduplication first? https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
czkawka
That certainly would thin the pile and cut down on the manual labor aspect. It uses a hashing method, iirc. Used it to thin out duplicate audio files, being careful not to delete files that might have the same filename but one would be a live rendition, and a studio/album rendition of the same song. Jimi Hendrix, in my experience, is notorious for this. One of the things that I dig about him, is that he never really performed the same song the same way. He sort of just really went with a stream of consciousness and pulled it off quite well.
The problem I see here is that the best images are those that have been edited, i.e. rotated, cropped, and adjusted brightness/contrast/saturation/white balance. Like I can have a thousand snaps from my camera, but they’ll only look good once I pick them out and edit them.
I suppose, if you have a consistent camera with photos in consistent conditions, you could apply edits in bulk. And I know Google has automated crop/rotate/etc features in the Google Photos app, so maybe you could find a self-hosted tool smart enough to do that across all your photos, then make a review pass to pick out the good ones.
I am unsure how you would go about that without AI. You could probably write a python script that hooks in with AI, that ranks by focus, brightness, saturation or other such criteria. However, I suspect that there would have to be a fair amount of manual labor to do that. That’s an interesting request. I’ll watch the thread and see what the outcome is.


